With the push of a ceremonial bell one year ago Sunday, Zynga Chief Executive Officer Mark Pincus launched his company into a new game - the stock market.

But after a tumultuous year, the San Francisco company that joined the Nasdaq stock market as the high-flying maker of popular social games like "CityVille," "FarmVille" and "Words With Friends" has failed to score points with investors.

Zynga's stock opened at $10 per share and once hit a high of $15.91, but never took off as some investors expected.

Instead, the price has languished below $3 per share after the company posted surprisingly huge misses on earnings. The company also said some new games did not perform or could not be released as swiftly as expected.

Zynga was then hit with the departure of several top executives and in October fired about 150 employees as part of a cost-cutting plan.

To be sure, the stock price alone is not a fair way to judge the 5-year-old company's success or failure. After all, Zynga boasts more than 311 million active players, a 37 percent jump from 240 million one year ago.

And Zynga still has some of the top games on Facebook - new sequels "FarmVille 2" and "CityVille 2" have 46 million and 30 million monthly average players, respectively, according to the independent Facebook data firm AppData.

Still, going into 2013, the pressure will be on Pincus to prove the company can execute its new strategies that focus on expanding beyond casual gamers and to launch games involving real money.

Going mobile

Most importantly, Zynga has reorganized itself to develop games that work where its players are going - to smartphones and tablets.

Pincus "has been vilified because he promised a lot of stuff that didn't end up happening," said Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research for Wedbush Securities. "But it wasn't his fault. He doesn't suck as bad as the press made him out to."

He added: "It's not a bad thing they went public, they just overpromised and under-delivered."

Several factors turned this onetime social media darling into a company struggling to regain momentum.

For one, Zynga's fortunes rose so quickly because it was the first social-game maker to take advantage of the marketing power of Facebook. But as Facebook made changes in the way notifications were posted on members' walls, it diminished the visibility of Zynga games even as more competitors were jumping onto the platform.

"I don't think they understood their business as well as all of us thought they understood their business," Pachter said. "They thought that if they keep doing the same things, they'll keep getting more and more customers, and that just wasn't really true. The monopoly went away when Facebook opened up the platform and allowed others to compete."

Switching to free

Pachter said Zynga's strategy of increasing the number of games it offered backfired. Zynga's titles are free to play, but they offer ways to pay for virtual goods to advance game play.

"As they grew the number of games they offered, more and more people stopped paying and switched over to something free," he said. "If you give people a reason not to pay, they won't pay."

Facebook and Zynga recently rewrote a five-year agreement between the two symbiotic partners. It's not a complete divorce, but the companies essentially agreed that they could see other people.

The new terms give Zynga far more flexibility to launch games outside of the Facebook platform, which is important as the company shifts to mobile and further develops its own Zynga.com network that already includes third-party game developers.

And Zynga is coping with another big trend - the rapid shift of consumers from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets that has affected all Internet companies, including Facebook. The sea change has particularly hit Zynga, which had prospered on Web-centric games like "FarmVille" and "CityVille."

"It's a shift in the ecosystem that happens to be hitting the entire industry by storm," said David Ko, who took over as chief operating officer in November in a major executive reshuffling.

Deep-sixing 'FishVille'

Ko, who had headed Zynga's mobile strategy, was promoted to replace former COO John Schappert. He has become a key figure in Zynga's internal reorganization to make smartphones or tablets part of every new game being developed.

Zynga has reallocated resources by winding down or pulling the plug on older, underperforming games like "Adventure World," "FishVille," "Treasure Isle" and "Vampire Wars."

This past year, Zynga launched 12 new Web games, but 14 new ones for mobile, with plans to release four mobile games each quarter. Zynga said it is also developing a mobile social gaming network around its "Words With Friends" franchise.

Ko agreed that Zynga still has to prove it can execute on its plans and that may "take time," but said the company's investment in mobile will pay off.

"We feel we have good momentum," he said.

Earlier in the year, Zynga thought it bought momentum by acquiring the developer of the then-hot mobile game "Draw Something," but the number of players instead dropped significantly.

Doing 'well enough'

Rich Greenfield, an analyst for BTIG, said the company has "done well enough" with new Web games, but had "nothing like the type of success they had." And that might not be good enough in the chase for mobile players.

"The challenge is they not only have to make great games, but they have to make great mobile games," said Greenfield, who became an outspoken Zynga critic after the company surprised analysts with a money-losing second-quarter earnings report.

"It's fair to say there has been nothing they've done successfully beyond what they acquired," Greenfield said. "They have been surprised by the pace of the mobile transition and how ill-suited they were for that transition."

But Ko noted Zynga did have some positive mobile news last week when its 2-year-old "Poker by Zynga" landed at the top of Apple's list of top-grossing iPhone apps.

Aiming for 'mid-core'

Zynga is also trying to expand its base to include "mid-core" gamers - a spot in the market between the casual gamers who propelled Zynga to success and the hard-core gamers who have long been the foundation of the video game industry. Mid-core gamers tend to be males who spend more than average gamers.

In September, Zynga bought San Mateo mid-core game developer A Bit Lucky, which is working on a multi-platform game called "Solstice Arena."

Also, Zynga has slowly moved toward social games that involve real-money payouts, not just virtual crops, cows or game cash.

The company recently partnered with Europe's Bwin.party digital entertainment, which operates online gaming in Britain. The companies are working on games such as a "FarmVille"-branded slots game.

Zynga also applied to the Nevada Gaming Control Board to start operating real-money online games for residents of that state. But that process could take months, and barring any changes in federal laws, Zynga would have to apply state by state to expand real money gaming in the United States.

Uncertain market

Pachter at Wedbush said real-money gaming won't be the revenue generator for Zynga that some investors hope.

"It's a much smaller market than most people think, and they (Zynga) don't have a significant competitive advantage," he said. "I'm not so sure they're going to be dominant in real-money gaming."

Ko said the company is still experimenting with real-money games.

"We are trying a whole bunch of different things, but at the core of it, our mission as a company hasn't changed," Ko said. "We want to connect the world through games."